Trivia / Metroid Prime

This is the Trivia page for the first Metroid Prime. See here for the entire Prime Trilogy's Trivia page.

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• Breakthrough Hit: Prior to the release of Metroid Prime, Retro Studios had not released a single game; all of their prior projects ended up being canceled. Metroid Prime's success solidified them as a worthy studio and Nintendo's biggest western subsidiary.
• Creator Backlash: The original game's developers had expressed disappointment in having their names be unlisted in the credits for Remastered despite being alluded to; this is doubly disappointing given what a mess the production process was on that title.
• Cut Song: The original NTSC GameCube version of Prime only has the first 36 seconds of Flaahgra's Battle Theme Music. All future releases, including the PAL and Japanese versions of the GameCube release, have the full song.
• Demand Overload: For Metroid Prime Remastered on the Nintendo Switch. While the digital release didn't cause the eShop to crash, the physical release was a different story. Much like other physical games the publisher has put out, it seems that physical copies were underproduced, only having enough copies to cover pre-orders at certain retailers, with the scant spare amount of physical copies being sold out almost immediately. Nintendo of America was quick to put out a notice that it will be working on producing more copies to meet this strong demand.
• Dueling Games: Remastered was one to Dead Space (Remake). Both are remakes of acclaimed science-fiction games from the Turn of the Millennium. Both games have many similarities in both story and gameplay. On the story side, they both involve main characters who respond to a distress call on a remote planet and end up having to stop The Corruption. Their gameplay is also complementary as well, with Metroid Prime being a primarily exploration-based game with some minor horror elements, and Dead Space being a primarily horror-based game with some minor exploration elements. In the end, however, neither game truly won nor lost here. Both games were met with strong reception as worthy adaptations and updates of their source material, and both had similarly strong sales as a result.
• Dummied Out:
  • Rippers were going to be used, but got replaced by Gliders. They can be added back in via hacking.
  • There are multiple animations of Samus' reflection in her visor making facial expressions such as anger and shock. In the finished product, her reflection rarely changes from a stoic stare.
  • This game has voiceovers that were supposed to introduce each area by name; all are still on the disc, but the scripting is broken. The only trigger that actually works is transitioning from Tallon Overworld to Impact Crater or vice versa. This feature would be restored in the Updated Re-release.
  • Additionally, the game was originally going to feature an introduction to Samus and a summary of the first game in the series that was read by an uncredited actress (commonly assumed to be Jennifer Hale), rather than the narrator who reads it in the PAL version of the game or the silence that's there in the NTSC version.
• Executive Meddling: A positive example. Despite resistance from basically everyone else involved, Miyamoto insisted the game be a first-person shooter. To say this mandate from Miyamoto paid off is a gross understatement.
• God Never Said That:
  • It's often claimed (including on this very wiki) that there is an unused opening narration featuring Jennifer Hale as Samus Aran. While audio lead Clark Wen confirmed that an actress with the initials "JH" provided Samus's grunts of pain and Hale herself has said that she played the role in multiple interviews, the narrator's actress was never confirmed. Furthermore, the narration refers to Samus in the third-person, making it unlikely (but not impossible) that Samus is intended to be the narrator.
  • Kraid's planned appearance was not meant to be in place of the Omega Pirate, despite rumors to the contrary.
• Killer App: Prime was one of the reasons to own a Nintendo GameCube.
• Orphaned Reference: The escape sequence at the very end of the game was cut, but the message that would've played at the beginning of it ("Crater Collapse Imminent. Evacuate Immediately.") still appears during the ending cutscene.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Retro Studios founder Jeff Spangenberg was forced out of his own company by Nintendo months before the release of the game when they realized what he had and hadn't been doing throughout not just the Troubled Production of Metroid Prime, but every other project at his studio since its inception: Spangenberg was frequently absent as both a developer and a manager, instead spending his time and Nintendo's money enjoying the high life with yacht parties, strip clubs, and drugs — one frequent story by former employees recounted that during the chaotic pre-production phase of a project that would eventually be cancelled so they could work on Prime, Spangenberg pulled up in a new Ferrari he won at an auction, having done so solely to outbid John Carmack. Nintendo eventually learned about Spangenberg's behavior in the summer of 2001 because of a website that he made documenting all his latest partying, photo-ops with topless woman, and cocaine habits, all hosted on Retro's own servers. Due to his high position in Retro, he wasn't immediately fired, but Nintendo bought out all his shares (reclassifying Retro as a first party developer and division of Nintendo) and Spangenberg was quietly forced to leave. Spangenberg ended up forming his own development studio Topheavy Studios, which ended up creating the controversial The Guy Game, before leaving the gaming industry for good.
• Sequel Gap: Released almost a decade after Super Metroid because the developers didn't know if they could properly follow up that game. As a result, this was the first 3D Metroid.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: According to a Shinesparkers interview with Senior Artist Mike Sneath, his design for the Phazon Suit came about as a result of not having enough time to plan a fully original suit.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Metroid Prime Remastered had been classified by the German and Australian game rating boards in mid-2021, but was shelved until early 2023, presumably to release in closer proximity to Metroid Prime 4.
• Sleeper Hit: Metroid Prime was not anticipated by its creators to be the smash hit it ended up becoming. For starters, the project was the first endeavor by Retro Studios to make it past pre-production (it had become a recurring joke at Retro that once they created past a thousand pages of design documents, their project would be cancelled), on top of the actual production being notoriously fraught. On Nintendo's side, Prime was mostly handled like a low-stakes Gaiden Game as Metroid was never that commercially successful a franchise to begin with (especially in Japan), with lead producer John Whitmore even saying that "Miyamoto didn't care if we killed it." However, once the game was first revealed at SpaceWorld 2000, the intensely positive early reaction caused Nintendo to reevaluate the project and a franchise as a whole, giving it increasingly high attention, and even releasing a companion game in the form of Metroid Fusion to be released the same day as Prime. When they came out, the rest was history.
• Troubled Production: Not counting how most of their early work was thrown away, at a certain point, the Japanese crew was spending most of their year in America overseeing the game, and Retro Studios' staff was basically living in the office and nourishing on atomic fireball candy to hit the deadlines. An article on the chaos that was Retro Studios before and during that game downright ends with the declaration that many developers declined to give interviews for the piece specifically because that would just ignite bad memories. And the head of Retro Studios at the time, Jeff Spangenberg, got in trouble with Nintendo for spending all his money on strippers and drugs, and for using company servers, which were paid by Nintendo, to run a personal softcore porn collection website. Not only was Jeff himself in several of the videos, but they were also time-stamped, showing he'd filmed them during hours he was supposed to be working on the game. Eventually Spangenberg was forced by Nintendo to sell his shares of the company to them, making Retro Studios a Nintendo-owned company, which was in everyone's best interests.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The entire game was originally going to be in third-person view, but Shigeru Miyamoto wasn't pleased with it (citing that it wasn't intuitive) and had the team scrap what they had so far in order to redo the game in first-person view.
  • The Morph Ball almost didn't make it into the game due to the development team having trouble trying to make the transition from first person view to third person view being seamless as it was in Super Metroid when Samus curls and uncurls in ball form. The dev team planned to scrap the power-up if they couldn't get the idea to work, but Miyamoto stated that if the team couldn't get the idea to work, then the game itself wouldn't work.
  • At first the artists took to rendering classic Metroid enemies such as Sovas and Kihunters, but Nintendo told them to try making their own enemy designs instead. This led to Tallon IV having a much more unique ecosystem and less of a rehash of Super.
  • Apparently, it took so long to find a composer for the game that the team was ready to leave the game without any soundtrack at all, if need be. Kenji Yamamoto finally stepped up late in development and composed the game's soundtrack.
  • In 2022, it was confirmed that Autechre were initially considered to compose the game by both Sean Booth (of the group) and Clark Wen (audio lead). While Nintendo declined, both band members were thanked in the credits.
  • Equipping different Beam weapons would have caused the Arm Cannon to transform entirely - for example, the Ice Beam would've turned it into a claw and the Wave Beam would've turned it into a tapered alien shape.
  • The Phazon Suit was going to be purple and green, similar to the Fusion-Varia Suit from Fusion.
  • Kraid was going to be a boss in the Phazon Mines. He got far enough in development that he was modeled and textured◊, but was cut for time. According to the modeler, Gene Kohler, he was not replaced by the Omega Pirate; he was already planned to appear before Kraid's cut. Kraid's exclusion here meant that it took nearly two decades before he would appear in a Metroid game again, in Metroid Dread. Concept art also shows a giant version of Mother Brain and different versions of Ridley (one showing his muscles and organs while another had him look more robotic), implying that those could have been in the game.
  • An odd enemy with a Queen Metroid-like head, a Zebesian-like claw cannon, and a bunch of tentacles, was scrapped. Its model was placed in the Pirate lab in Phendrana Drifts as a corpse called Experiment 7526.
  • It was originally intended for Samus to battle a much less restricted Parasite Queen; in other words, the Queen was not going to be fought within a container as seen in the final version of the game. This is shown in Metroid Prime 's very first trailer, with the boss running across the room and climbing on walls.
  • The game's files contain an unused model and animations for a boss resembling a large ice-themed primate that was supposed to be the boss of Phendrana Drifts instead of Thardus (who was originally the boss of the Magmoor Caverns). It was cut because the developers felt that its design didn't fit in well with the rest of the game or the Metroid series as a whole. Consequently, Thardus was moved to Phendrana Drifts, which is how the Magmoor Caverns became the only area in the game without a boss or even a mini-boss.
  • The Impact Crater was intended to be much larger than the one in the final game, and also would've featured an escape sequence after defeating the Metroid Prime. This was cut due to time constraints, but a small hint that you were supposed to escape during gameplay remains in the final game: the ending cutscene after defeating Metroid Prime features a title card reading "Crater Collapse Imminent. Evacuate Immediately." Since that escape now happens off-screen, it feels like an odd insert.
  • The Screw Attack and Speed Booster power-ups were going to be obtainable, but were scrapped. The Screw Attack was later added to Metroid Prime 2: Echoes while the Speed Booster wouldn't appear in a 3D Metroid game until Metroid: Other M.
  • Retro wanted to include Super Metroid as a secret Embedded Precursor, but Nintendo shot it down because they lacked an in-house way to emulate SNES games on the GameCube. While it was possible with third-party software, they didn't want to deal with any potential legal issues. They settled with adding the original Metroid.
  • At one point, the game was set between Super and Fusion, and Phazon was once a byproduct of Metroids based on their Energy Being nature.
  • Retro Studios didn't start out by developing a Metroid title. Rather, one of the first titles they worked was an action-adventure title that starred three Action Girls who fought genetically-enhanced terrorists on Earth. It was then retooled to an alien working for Earth to fend of an invasion from a different alien race. Shigeru Miyamoto saw this pitch and, impressed by the alien designs, suggested the team scrap it in favor of a Metroid game.
  • Retro Studios developed the game with the mindset of it being a Continuity Reboot or Gaiden Game. It was Nintendo who decided it should become a canon interquel to the first two Metroid games.
  • There were no plans originally to have bonuses tied to connecting the game with Metroid Fusion, because Fusion didn't even exist, much less be in development. Incidentally, Fusion exists because of the positive reaction to Prime's Spaceworld 2000 trailer.

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